Nearly everyone familiar with the history of the 1960s has heard of Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, the pranksters who spread the gospel of psychedelics to the countercultural generation. But far fewer remember Owsley Stanley.

Stanley, who died Saturday at age 76, was arguably as pivotal as Leary and Kesey for altering minds in the turbulent '60s. Among a legion of youthful seekers, his name was synonymous with the ultimate high as a copious producer of what Rolling Stone once called "the best LSD in the world … the genuine Owsley." He reputedly made more than a million doses of the drug, much of which fueled Kesey's notorious Acid Tests — rollicking parties featuring all manner of psychedelic substances, strobe lights and music. Tom Wolfe immortalized Stanley as the "Acid King" in the counterculture classic "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968).

The music that rocked Kesey's events was made by the Grateful Dead, the iconic rock band of the era that also bears Stanley's imprint. His chief effect on the band stemmed not merely from supplying its musicians with top-grade LSD but from his technical genius: As the Dead's early sound engineer, Stanley, nicknamed "Bear," developed a radical system he called the "wall of sound," essentially a massive public address system that reduced distortion and enabled the musicians to mix from the stage and monitor their playing.

"Owsley was truly important in setting the example of someone who would go to almost any length, beyond what anyone would think reasonable, to pursue the goal of perfection … sonic perfection, the finest planet Earth ever saw," Grateful Dead publicist Dennis McNally said Monday. "They never would have done that without Bear. Furthermore, the greater San Francisco scene never would have been what it was without the opportunity for thousands of people to experience psychedelics, which would not have happened without Bear."

Stanley, who moved to Australia more than 30 years ago, was driving his car in a storm near the town of Mareeba in Queensland when he lost control and crashed, said Sam Cutler, a longtime friend and former Grateful Dead tour manager. He died at the scene. His wife, Sheilah, sustained minor injuries.

Described by Cutler as a man who held "very firm beliefs about potential disasters," Stanley relocated to Australia because he believed it was the safest place to avoid a new ice age. He was a fanatical carnivore who once said that eating broccoli may have contributed to a heart attack several years ago. In his later years he was mainly a sculptor and jeweler, and his works were sought by many in the music industry, including the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards, Cutler said.

"He was a very sophisticated man," Cutler said, "an amalgam of scientist and engineer, chemist and artist."

With artist Bob Thomas, Stanley designed the Dead's distinctive logo: a skull emblazoned with a lightning bolt. He also recorded about 100 of the band's performances, many of which later were released as albums. He once said that he considered preserving the live concerts one of his most important accomplishments.

Born Augustus Owsley Stanley III in Kentucky on Jan. 19, 1935, he was the grandson of a Kentucky governor and son of a naval commander. His nickname, Bear, reputedly was inspired by the profuse chest hair he sprouted in adolescence.

He studied engineering briefly at the University of Virginia before dropping out and joining the Air Force, where he trained as a radio operator. After completing his military service in 1958, he moved to California and worked at a variety of jobs, including a stint at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cańada Flintridge. He also studied ballet, Russian and French.

He enrolled at UC Berkeley in 1963 as the Free Speech Movement was erupting and drugs such as LSD began flowing. He got his first taste of LSD in April 1964. "I remember the first time I took acid and walked outside," he told Rolling Stone in 2007, "and the cars were kissing the parking meters."

That experience convinced him that he needed a steady and trustworthy supply. He found a recipe at the campus library. Then, with a chemistry major named Melissa Cargill, he started a lab and began manufacturing a very pure form of the drug.

His lab was raided twice; Stanley spent two years in prison. According to "A Long Strange Trip," McNally's history of the Grateful Dead, Stanley estimated that he had produced enough LSD to provide about 1.25 million doses between 1965 and 1967.

After his release from prison in 1972, he returned to the Dead and began working on a new sound system, a monolithic collection of speakers and microphones that channeled the music through a single cluster of equipment. The band introduced it in 1974 at San Francisco's Cow Palace, but it was too expensive to sustain and Stanley later gave most of it away. But his ideas were later adopted by concert equipment makers.

Not everyone was a fan of the system. "It was always malfunctioning," Country Joe McDonald, of the '60s psychedelic band Country Joe & the Fish, said in an interview Monday. "The Grateful Dead and their extended family were like a unit, a nine-headed hydra. They did things their own way. People loved it. It was part of their mystique." Stanley, whom McDonald knew slightly and remembered as "kind of an obnoxious" person, "fit in really well."

For a brief time Stanley was the Grateful Dead's main financial backer and put them up in a pink stucco house in Watts, where he had moved his LSD lab. A 1966 Los Angeles Times profile described Stanley roaring up to a Sunset Boulevard bank on a motorcycle with wads of money crammed in his helmet, pockets and boots. The Times' and other accounts described him as an LSD millionaire, a status Stanley denied. But it inspired a Dead song, "Alice D. Millionaire." He also was immortalized in a Steely Dan composition, "Kid Charlemagne," and in a Jimi Hendrix recording of the Beatles' "Day Tripper," in which Hendrix can be heard calling out "Owsley, can you hear me now?"

Stanley downplayed his influence on the psychedelic explosion, explaining that he began producing LSD only to ensure the quality of what he ingested.

"I just wanted to know the dose and purity of what I took into my own body. Almost before I realized what was happening, the whole affair had gotten completely out of hand. I was riding a magic stallion. A Pegasus," he told Rolling Stone. "I was not responsible for his wings, but they did carry me to all kinds of places."

In addition to his wife, he is survived by sons Pete and Starfinder; daughters Nina and Redbird; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

"He was a fanatical carnivore who once said that eating broccoli may have contributed to a heart attack several years ago."

LOL -

I remember reading the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in the seventies. Then seeing the movie One Flew Over the Coockoos Nest. Tom Wolfe came to our college to speak.I guess a movie on 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' is coming out this year?

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a work of literary journalism by Tom Wolfe, published in 1968. Using techniques from the genre of hysterical realism and pioneering new journalism, the "nonfiction novel" tells the story of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. The book follows the Pranksters across the country driving in a psychedelic painted school bus dubbed "Furthur," reaching what they considered to be personal and collective revelations through the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs. The novel also describes the Acid Tests, early performances by The Grateful Dead, and Kesey's exile to Mexico.

In 1968, Eliot Fremont-Smith of The New York Times called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test "not simply the best book on hippies… [but also] the essential book."[1]

Film adaptationA film adaptation of the book is in development for a 2011 release. It will be directed by Gus Van Sant.[2]

PS,I remember travelling to Lehigh to see Timothy Leary give a lecture in the mid 70's.

My impression was he was brain damaged due to too much LSD. He was somewhat incoherent, rambling, almost "Sheen-like" saying something about space colonies. That is all I remember. My friend was also as less than impressed.

I would recommend reading the "Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test" and Hunter S. Thompson's "Hell's Angels" together at some point. Kesey and the HA were parts of a social circle and the differences of perspective on interactions is interesting (as are the interactions, all by themselves!).

NOW that the 1960s are commodified forever as “The Sixties,” it is apparently compulsory that their legacy be rendered as purple-hazy hagiography. But that ignores an inconvenient counterintuitive truth: Relatively clear-thinking entrepreneurs created some of the most enduring tropes of the era — not out of whole paisley cloth but from their astute feel for the culture and the marketplace. And no one was better at it than Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

Entrepreneur? Mr. Stanley, who was killed in a car accident last Sunday in Australia at the age of 76, is remembered chiefly as a world-class eccentric — his C.V. lists Air Force electronics specialist and ballet dancer — who after ingesting his first dose of LSD in Berkeley in 1964 taught himself how to make his own. In short order, “Owsley acid” became the gold standard of psychedelics.

But Mr. Stanley didn’t stop there. He started cranking out his superlative LSD at a rate that by 1967 topped one million doses. By mass-manufacturing a hallucinogen that the authorities hadn’t gotten around to criminalizing, Mr. Stanley singlehandedly created a market where none had existed, and with it a large part of what would become the “counterculture.”

At the time Madison Avenue was at sea about how to reach the so-called youth market. “House hippies” were deputized as cultural ambassadors but didn’t prevent travesties like Columbia Records’ infamously clueless “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music” ad campaign. Which made Mr. Stanley’s effortless grasp of his peer group and its appetites — he was, after all, an enthusiastic consumer of his own product — seem all the more prescient. When his lab in Orinda, Calif., was raided in 1967 — thanks to him, LSD had been declared illegal the year before — the headline in The San Francisco Chronicle anointed him the “LSD Millionaire.”

Mr. Stanley shared several qualities with another entrepreneur who, a decade later, would imbue his company with a hand-sewn ‘60s ethic that persists today. To compare Mr. Stanley to Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple, purely on the basis of their operating philosophies is not as big a leap as it might seem.

Like Mr. Jobs, Mr. Stanley was fanatical about quality control. He refused to put his LSD on pieces of paper — so-called blotter acid — because, Mr. Stanley maintained, it degraded the potency. “I abhor the practice,” he declared.

Whereas the formulation and provenance of most street drugs was unknowable, Owsley LSD was curated like a varietal wine and branded as evocatively as an iPod — “Monterey Purple” for a batch made expressly for the 1967 Monterey Pop festival, which may have factored into Jimi Hendrix’s chaotic, guitar-burning finale. (Relentlessly protective of his brand, Mr. Stanley seemed insulted that many believed the Hendrix song “Purple Haze” was about the Monterey LSD — far from inducing haze, he sniffed, the quality of his acid would confer upon the user preternatural clarity.)

And like Mr. Jobs’s mandate for creating products he deems “insanely great,” Mr. Stanley’s perfectionism had the effect of raising standards across an industry — or in this case, a culture. He became a patron of the Grateful Dead and helped transform them from inchoate noodlers into the house band for a generation. Noting the dreadful acoustics at their performances, Mr. Stanley drew on his electronics background and designed one of the first dedicated rock sound reinforcement systems, thus making plausible that highly lucrative staple of the 1960s and beyond, the rock concert. (Ever the perfectionist, he later designed an upgraded version, the legendary Wall of Sound, that towered over the band like a monolith and prefigured the immense sound systems at stadium shows today.)

It is said we are living through times not unlike the 1960s, the catalyst being not rock ‘n’ roll and its accompaniments, sex and drugs, but the communications and information revolution made possible by the Web. Among the movement’s many avenging nerds, Mr. Jobs alone epitomizes Mr. Stanley’s unhinged originality and anarchical spirit — before founding Apple, Mr. Jobs and his partner, Steve Wozniak, sold illegal “blue boxes” that allowed free long-distance calls and later proselytized so persuasively about the latest Apple gizmo that he was said to project a “reality distortion field.”

Augustus Owsley Stanley III knew a thing or two about that.

Michael Walker is the author of “Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood.”

Woof, Probably not as many as one might think, especially when compared to tobacco and alcohol and prescription pills. I survived the 60's and 70's and er.. part of the 50's as well, I'm telling my age now, but I personally saw only one incidence where LSD led to someone becoming mentally disturbed afterward and he was already at the edge of that, maybe over. The fact is substance abuse is more about the abuser than the substance itself. But I agree with your sentiment that cranking out the best acid on the scene shouldn't be a badge of honor either. I do recall hazily, another incidence where a underage, long hair, very handsome and bright kid, sneaked into to a new movie called the Exorcist and in the throes of the part where the possessed girl turns her head all the way around on her shoulders, shouted at the top of his lungs, "Far out man!!!!!!". The packed theater exploded in laughter, with comments of "I want whatever that guy's on."

BERLIN (AP) -- Veterinary experts performed a necropsy Monday on Berlin zoo's celebrity polar bear Knut to try to determine why he died suddenly over the weekend.

The four-year-old polar bear died Saturday afternoon in front of visitors, turning around several times and then dropping to the ground, and falling into the water in his enclosure.

Polar bears usually live 15 to 20 years in the wild, and even longer in captivity, and the zoo is hoping the investigation may help clarify what happened.

Results were expected later Monday or on Tuesday, the zoo said.

In the meantime, people continued to flock to the zoo to sign their name in a condolence book in tribute to Knut.

"Every visit to the Zoo brought happiness, because he was such a warmhearted animal and he brought us all so much fun," visitor Eveline Plat told AP Television News.

Knut was rejected by his mother at birth, along with his twin brother, who only survived a couple of days. He attracted attention when his main caregiver, Thomas Doerflein, camped out at the zoo to give the button-eyed cub his bottle every two hours. The bear went on to appear on magazine covers, in a film and on mountains of merchandise.

Doerflein, the zookeeper who raised him, died in 2008 of a heart attack.

Soon after Knut and Doerflein's first public appearance in early 2007, fan clubs sprang up across the globe. "Knutmania" led to a 2007 Vanity Fair cover with actor Leonardo DiCaprio shot by photographer Annie Leibovitz, a film and plush Knut toys.

Zoo spokeswoman Claudia Beinek said that they had to set up another condolence book online to accommodate the outpouring of sympathy from around the world for the polar bear.

In addition, the zoo said it was starting a special account to accept donations on Knut's behalf, which will be used for polar bear research and the preservation of their habitat.

"He has brought joy to us, the Berliners and many others around the world," the zoo said in a statement. "Knut also was an icon for the endangerment of his species and natural habitats of all wild animals."

Thank you CCP! Harmon Killebrew was my childhood hero. Class act! It took very little charting to figure where to sit in left field and be guaranteed Killebrew home run baseball. Mostly from pre-game batting practice but I think I got one every time I went to the ballpark. Pretty amazing for a little kid, to sit some 400 feet away and have your favorite player hit it right into your glove.

"Pretty amazing for a little kid, to sit some 400 feet away and have your favorite player hit it right into your glove."

Wow. The closest I ever got to getting a ball was at Yankee stadium when after a foul ball was hit and fell somewhere well behind me I looked down at the ground in front of my chair only to see the ball roll right between my feet and down the rows of seats in front of me. Probaly twenty people didn't realize it was rolling down to the front row between their legs.

I saw a report that said he was 62, which is odd because he was a year behind me (and I am 58) when I attended Fieldston HS (until I was thrown out for political activism, but that's another story) Fieldston was a private school that was about 90% Jewish with substantial diversity scholarships. One of Gil's friends told me that Gil was stirring up a lot of trouble until finally his mom was called in. In a big meeting the various teachers told her of their problems with Gil. She looked back at them and said "When I have problems with Gil at home, do I call you?"

Let it be said that Anna Schwartz led a model professional life. In our mercurial times, that is no small thing.

Most often, Anna Schwartz, who died Thursday at age 96, was included in sentences as co-author with Milton Friedman of the magisterial economic study "A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960." That would suffice for the epitaph of nearly any economist. It does not for Anna Schwartz.

The daughter of a manager in the kosher meat department of Swift & Co., she graduated from Barnard College at age 18 and quickly earned a doctorate in economics. In 1941 she went to work for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the premier U.S. institution of economic studies, and never left.

Across six decades, she contributed strong work and commentary on economics, notably the financial system. In all her efforts to understand and explain financial behavior, Anna Schwartz focused on the system's primary need: stability.

Which brings us to the present economic instability, on which Schwarz had opinions that deserve to be heard again. Statements she made to this newspaper in a Weekend Interview three and a half years ago, in her early 90s, ring with clarity and relevance to current difficulties: "The Fed has gone about as if the problem is a shortage of liquidity. That is not the basic problem. The basic problem for the markets is that [uncertainty] that the balance sheets of financial firms are credible."

And pointedly: "Firms that made wrong decisions should fail. You shouldn't rescue them. And once that's established as a principle, I think the market recognizes that it makes sense. Everything works much better when wrong decisions are punished and good decisions make you rich." But, she added, "That's not the way the world has been going in recent years." She liked understatement.

Anna Schwartz performed at the most austere level of her profession and gave the world the sensible, helpful results of that extraordinary achievement. We suspect she'd say there's still time to get it right.

It seems to me that she lived her life according to a creed that would make all members of the Pack and Tribe proud.

From the article:

Maria Santos Gorrostieta, who had already survived two assassination attempts, was driving the child to school at around 8.30am when she was ambushed by a car in the city of Morelia.

The 36-year-old was hauled from her vehicle and physically assaulted as horrified witnesses watched, according to newspaper El Universal.They described how she begged for her child to be left alone and then appeared to get into her abductors’ car willingly.

For three years, Shalom Yoran survived the German occupation of Poland even as he saw his fellow Jews slaughtered by the Nazis. When he and his family inevitably became targets themselves, his mother knew she would not escape.

Mr. Yoran’s memoir, “The Defiant,” describes how he and his brother escaped to become resistance fighters.

“Go, my beloved children,” she told Mr. Yoran and his brother, Musio, as they fled into a field to escape German gunfire. “Try to save yourselves and take vengeance for us.”

That was in September 1942. The brothers disappeared into the woods and went on to spend the rest of World War II fighting the elements, injury, illness and the Nazis.

After enduring the winter in an underground shelter that they had built, they shifted from trying to survive to striking back. They became Jewish partisans, joining many others in fighting an insurgent war against the occupying Germans in Poland and elsewhere.

By the spring of 1943, they had conducted their first mission: burning a factory that made rifle butts for German weapons. Mr. Yoran began to feel that he was fulfilling his mother’s wish.

“For me, this was the turning point in the war,” he wrote in a 1996 memoir, “The Defiant: A True Story of Jewish Vengeance and Survival.”

He continued: “Instead of constantly being on the run, or hiding underground trying to survive, I had actually participated in an attack on the German war machine. This was the beginning of my revenge.”

Mr. Yoran, who died on Sept. 9 in Manhattan at 88, was 14 when German forces invaded his hometown, Raciaz, and 17 the last time he saw his parents. His mother, Hannah, and his father, Shmuel, were killed within days of his escape into the woods with his brother, who was four years older. The Nazis eventually killed 1,040 Jews in Raciaz, virtually its entire Jewish population.

Mr. Yoran and his brother became full-time fighters, killing German soldiers on patrols or at their camps, planting mines, destroying roads and bridges — all while scrounging and stealing food and clothing. They soon made their way through northeast Poland, to the forests near Lake Naroch in what is now Belarus, to join a group of Jewish partisans who were coordinating their missions with Soviet forces.

“So here we were, fighting against a common enemy — the Germans, whose aim it was to totally annihilate the Jewish people and to take over the Soviet Union — side by side with fellow fighters whose own hatred of Jews was notorious,” Mr. Yoran wrote.

“In this demoralizing situation I told myself again and again that I was fighting as a Jew — with them, but not as one of them. I dreamed of having my own country, of fighting for it, and even dying for it. That was what kept up my morale.”

He and his brother joined the Polish Army, advancing into Germany in 1945 as Allied forces closed in on Berlin.

Mr. Yoran was born Selim Sznycer on June 29, 1925, in Warsaw, the son of a lumberyard owner. He had only limited schooling before his family fled the Nazis.

After the war he worked for a group that helped smuggle Jewish refugees into British-controlled Palestine, resisting British efforts to prevent them from entering.

He assumed many identities on his own journey there, including that of a British soldier. Finally, to convince the authorities that he was not a refugee but a lifelong resident of Palestine, he assumed the name of a dead cousin, Shalom Yoran, in 1946.

With the founding of Israel, and after receiving his high school equivalency diploma, Mr. Yoran joined the Israeli Air Force, learning aircraft maintenance. While in the Air Force he met Varda Granevsky. They married in 1954.

He later became an executive with Israel Aircraft Industries, which helped supply the Israeli government. It is now called Israel Aerospace Industries. He moved to the United States in the late 1970s to run an American office of an aircraft trading and manufacturing company.

It was after he had arrived in Palestine that Mr. Yoran began writing about his life, recording his memories in notebooks and on loose sheafs of paper while recovering from abdominal surgery in a hospital.

Decades later, while he and his wife were clearing out their apartment near Tel Aviv, he found the papers in a suitcase. The couple spent years translating the notes from Polish into English, often first into Hebrew. The fruit of their work was “The Defiant.”

Mr. Yoran died after a long illness, said his wife, a sculptor. He is also survived by two daughters, Dafna and Yaelle, and two grandsons.

His brother, who became known as Maurice Sznycer, moved to Paris after the war and became a professor of antiquities and West Semitic languages at the Sorbonne. He died in 2010.

Mr. Yoran helped found the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan. Near the end of his life, when he had dementia and other illnesses, his family established the Rose Art Foundation, which donates mobile reclining chairs to patients in need.

After “The Defiant” was published, Mr. Yoran frequently spoke publicly about his experience as a partisan.

“If there is a lesson to be gleaned, it is that no person should succumb to brutality without putting up a resistance,” he wrote in his book. “Individually it can save one’s life; en masse it can change the course of history.”

Another hero who fought for us has died of what sounds like war related problems. From meds used for chronic pain?

He was only 28. I was in my medical training at that age. So he urinated on dead bodies. Certainly distasteful but not a crime when your in a war zone fighting and enemy that would happily cut off your head.

****Marine who urinated on corpses in Afghanistan dies.

Associated Press By MARTHA WAGGONER 17 hours ago

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A decorated retired Marine whose career as a sniper was derailed by a video that showed him urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters has died, his attorney said Friday.

Cpl. Robert Richards, 28, was found dead Wednesday by his wife at their Jacksonville home, Attorney Guy Womack said. Neither foul play nor suicide is suspected.

The death was most likely from Richards changing medications he took because of injuries he suffered in a roadside bomb during one of his three tours in Afghanistan, Womack said.

Richards was demoted from sergeant after a video showed four Camp Lejeune Marines — in full body armor — urinating on three Afghans in 2011. One Marine looks down at the bodies and jokes, "Have a good day, buddy."

The video was posted on YouTube in early 2012. It was condemned internationally and caused outrage in the Middle East.

It was "a temporary lapse of discipline, and it should in no way define the service and honor of the snipers," Womack said.

Richards' sniper unit killed 12 Taliban fighters, some of whom the Marines knew were part of a cell making roadside bombs and training others, Womack said. About a month earlier, the Taliban cell had planted a bomb that blew the legs off a Marine.

One of the Marines in the video testified that their operation was designed to pursue bomb-making experts believed responsible for killing a corporal whose leg was later found hanging from a tree. The Marines were reacting to those events when they urinated on the bodies, Womack said.

"He never said it was OK," Womack said. "Marines shouldn't do that. At the same time, it really wasn't the crime of the century. "

Richards almost died when a roadside bomb exploded near him during his second tour, Womack said. Shrapnel went through his throat and an emergency tracheotomy on the battlefield saved his life, the attorney said. He also almost lost a foot and suffered back injuries. He was awarded a Purple Heart.

Richards was supposed to get 18 months off from active duty, but he returned early when a platoon commander asked him to join a new sniper unit that had no combat veteran snipers.

"He called it a personal obligation and said he would feel guilty if any of them were to die from their inexperience," Womack said.

Richards will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

I met her in the LA airport this past year. She was relaxed and easy to talk to. "I saw you on the Ed Sullivan Show" I said. The ES Show was a REALLY big deal in the 60s and she was one of the very first female comics to get a big break like that and become a regular. There was a moment of eye contact and she laughed and said "That was a long time ago". I moved on, leaving her to a couple of women chattering excitedly. She was relaxed and gracious with them.

Cindy tells me she was working one hour shows with vigor up to the end and that her will specifies one raucous funeral.

There was nobody like her. Some people are knockoffs or imitations of other, stronger, more vivid figures, but there was never another Joan Rivers before her or while she lived. She was a seriously wonderful, self-invented woman.

She was completely open and immediately accessible. She had the warmth of a person who found others keenly and genuinely interesting. It was also the warmth of a person with no boundaries: She wanted to know everything about you and would tell you a great deal about herself, right away. She had no edit function, which in part allowed her gift. She would tell you what she thought. She loved to shock, not only an audience but a friend. I think from the beginning life startled her, and she enjoyed startling you. You only asked her advice or opinion if you wanted an honest reply.

Her intelligence was penetrating and original, her tastes refined. Her duplex apartment on the east side of Manhattan was full of books in beautiful bindings, of elegant gold things on the table, lacquered boxes, antique furniture. She liked everything just so. She read a lot. She was a doctor’s daughter.

We met and became friends in 1992, but the story I always remember when I think of her took place in June 2004. Ronald Reagan had just died, and his remains were being flown from California to Washington, where he would lay in state at the U.S. Capitol. A group of his friends were invited to the Capitol to take part in the formal receiving of his remains, and to say goodbye. Joan was there, as a great friend and supporter of the Reagans.

That afternoon, as we waited for the plane to land, while we were standing and talking in a ceremonial room on the Senate side, there was, suddenly, an alarm. Secret Service men and Capitol police burst into the room and instructed us to leave, quickly and immediately. An incoming plane headed for the Capitol was expected to hit within minutes. “Run for your lives,” they commanded, and they meant it. Everyone in the Capitol ran toward the exits and down the great stairs. Joan was ahead of me, along with the television producer Tommy Corcoran, her best friend and boon companion of many years.

Down the long marble halls, down the long steps . . . At the bottom of the steps, in a grassy patch to the left, I saw Joan on the ground, breathless. Her high heel had broken, the wind knocked out of her. I’m not going any further, she said to Tommy. Keep going, she said. I should note that everyone really thought the Capitol was about to be attacked.

I stopped to ask if I could help, heard what Joan had said to Tommy and then heard Tommy’s reply: “I’m staying with you.”

“Run!” said Joan. She told him to save himself.

“No,” said Tommy. “It wouldn’t be as much fun without you.” He said if anything happened they’d go together. And he sat down next to her and held her hand and they waited for the plane to hit.

Needless to say it didn’t; some idiot flying an oblivious governor had drifted into restricted airspace. I don’t know if they ever had any idea how close they’d come to being shot down.

But that was a very Joan moment, her caring about her friend and him saying life would be lesser without her.

* * *I was lucky to have known her. I owe it to Steve Forbes, the publisher and former presidential hopeful who, with his family, owned a chateau in France near the Normandy coast. It was the family’s custom once a year to invite friends and associates for a long weekend, and in the summer of 1992 I went, and met Joan. Talk about a life force.

We all stayed in beautiful rooms. Joan amused herself making believe she was stealing the furniture. It rained through the weekend, which Joan feared would make Steve and Sabina Forbes blue, so she organized a group of us to go into town to a costume-rental place so we could put on a show. All they had was French Revolution outfits, so we took them, got back to our rooms, and Joan and I wrote a play on what we announced were French revolutionary themes. Walter Cronkite, another guest, was chosen by Joan as narrator. I think the play consisted mostly of members of Louis XIV’s court doing Catskills stand-up. It was quite awful and a big success.

The highlight of the weekend was a balloon lift, a Forbes tradition—scores of huge balloons in brilliant colors and patterns would lift from the grounds of the chateau after dawn and travel over the countryside. It was so beautiful. I stood and watched, not meaning to participate, and was half pushed into a gondola. By luck Joan was there, full of good humor and information on what we were seeing below.

We held on hard as we experienced a hard and unplanned landing on a French farm. We were spilled out onto a field. As we scrambled and stood, an old farmer came out, spoke to us for a moment, ran into his farmhouse and came back with an old bottle of calvados. He then told us he hadn’t seen Americans since D-Day, and toasted us for what America had done for his country. No one was more moved than Joan, who never forgot it.

* * *

I last saw her in July. A friend and I met her for lunch at a restaurant she’d chosen in Los Angeles. It was full of tourists. Everyone at the tables recognized her and called out. She felt she owed her fans everything and never ignored or patronized an admirer. She smiled through every picture with every stranger. She was nice—she asked about their families, where they were from, how they liked it here. They absolutely knew she would treat them well and she absolutely did.

The only people who didn’t recognize Joan were the people who ran the restaurant, who said they didn’t have her reservation and asked us to wait in the bar, where waiters bumped into us as they bustled by. Joan didn’t like that, gave them 10 minutes to get their act together, and when they didn’t she left. But she didn’t just leave. She stood outside on the sidewalk, and as cars full of people went by with people calling out, “Joan! We love you!” she would yell back, “Thank you but don’t go to this restaurant, they’re rude! Boycott this restaurant!” My friend said, “Joan, stop it, you’re going to wind up on TMZ.”

“I don’t care,” she said. She felt she was doing a public service.

We went to a restaurant down the street, where when she walked in they almost bowed.

She wouldn’t let a friend pay a bill, ever. She tipped like a woman who used to live on tips. She was hilarious that day on the subject of Barack and Michelle Obama, whom she did not like. (I almost didn’t write that but decided if Joan were here she’d say, “Say I didn’t like Obama!”)

She was a Republican, always a surprising thing in show business, and in a New Yorker, but she was one because, as she would tell you, she worked hard, made her money with great effort, and didn’t feel her profits should be unduly taxed. She once said in an interview that if you have 19 children she will pay for the first four but no more. Mostly she just couldn’t tolerate cant and didn’t respond well to political manipulation. She believed in a strong defense because she was a grown-up and understood the world to be a tough house. She loved Margaret Thatcher, who said what Joan believed: The facts of life are conservative. She didn’t do a lot of politics in her shows—politics divides an audience—but she thought a lot about it and talked about it. She was socially liberal in the sense she wanted everyone to find as many available paths to happiness as possible.

* * *

I am not sure she ever felt accepted by the showbiz elite, or any elite. She was too raw, didn’t respect certain conventions, wasn’t careful, didn’t pretend to a false dignity. She took the celebrated and powerful down a peg. Her wit was broad and spoofing—she would play the fool—but it was also subversive and transgressive. People who weren’t powerful or well-known saw and understood what she was doing.

She thought a lot about how things work and what they mean.

She once told me she figured a career was like a shark, either it is going forward or it is dying and sinking to the ocean floor. She worked like someone who believed that, doing shows in houses big and small all over the country, hundreds a year, along with her cable programs, interviews, and books. She supported a lot of people. Many members of her staff stayed for decades and were like family. Because of that, when I visited the hospital last week, I got to witness a show-business moment Joan would have liked. A relative was scrolling down on her iPhone. “Listen to this,” she said, and read aloud something a young showbiz figure who had been lampooned by Joan had just tweeted. She said it was an honor to be made fun of by such a great lady. “Joan will be furious when she sees this,” said the relative, shaking her head. “She won’t be able to make fun of her in the act anymore.”

It was Joan who explained to me 15 or 20 years ago a new dimension in modern fame—that it isn’t like the old days when you’d down a city street and people would recognize you. Fame had suddenly and in some new way gone universal. Joan and a friend had just come back from a safari in Africa. One day they were walking along a path when they saw some local tribesmen. As the two groups passed, a tribesman exclaimed, “Joan Rivers, what are you doing here?!”

She couldn’t believe it. This is Africa, she thought. And then she thought no, this is a world full of media that show the world American culture. We talked about it, and I asked, beyond the idea of what might be called Western cultural imperialism, what else does the story mean to you? “It means there’s no place to hide,” she said. They can know you anywhere. At the time, the Internet age was just beginning.

Her eye was original. Twenty years ago, when everyone was talking about how wonderful it was that Vegas had been cleaned up and the mob had been thrown out, Joan said no, no, no, they are ruining the mystique. First of all, she said, those mobsters knew how to care for a lady, those guys with bent noses were respectful and gentlemen, except when they were killing you. Second, she said, organized crime is better than disorganized crime, which will replace it. Third, the mobsters had a patina of class, they dressed well and saw that everyone else did, so Vegas wasn’t a slobocracy, which is what it is becoming with men in shorts playing the slots in the lobby of the hotel. The old Vegas had dignity. She hated the bluenoses who’d clean up what wasn’t mean to be clean. No one wanted Sin City cleaned up, she said, they wanted to go there and visit sin and then go home.

* * *

Joan now is being celebrated, rightly and beautifully, by those who knew and loved her. They are defining her contributions (pioneer, unacknowledged feminist hero, gutsy broad) and lauding the quality of her craft.

But it is a great unkindness of life that no one says these things until you’re gone.

According to CNN, a Yorkville Endoscopy staff member told investigators the photograph was taken while Rivers was in the procedure room.

The 81-year-old entertainer went to the clinic to undergo a scheduled endoscopy by gastroenterologist and the clinic's medical director Dr. Lawrence Cohen, according to reports. After that procedure, CNN reports Rivers also underwent an unauthorized vocal cord biopsy performed by a physician, who hasn't been identified.

While she was under!

On Friday Yorkville Endoscopy announced Dr. Cohen was no longer medical director of the clinic, located in Manhattan. Reports are conflicting as to whether he voluntarily stepped down or was fired.

“Dr. Cohen is not currently performing procedures at Yorkville Endoscopy, nor is he currently serving as medical director,” a spokesperson from the clinic said in a statement obtained by TheWrap.

On Sept. 5 the New York Medical Examiner's Office told TheWrap that the autopsy on Rivers’ body did not yield a firm cause or manner of death, and that further studies would be conducted to determine exactly how she died following the Aug. 28 procedure.

Rivers was immediately rushed to a nearby hospital, but did not recover. She was placed in a medically-induced coma and had been on life support when she died on Sept. 4.

Remembering Senator Fred ThompsonOriginally published at the Washington Times

Callista and I are deeply saddened by the passing of Senator Fred Thompson. Our hearts go out to his wife Jeri and their family. Fred was much more than a United States Senator. He was a big man. At six feet, six inches tall, he towered over the room and had a powerful, deep voice to match his physical stature. My favorite memory of Fred was his role as the Admiral Josh Painter in the Hunt for Red October. I was deeply impressed by the way he said: “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it.” He made it sound authoritative and definitive and he looked the part perfectly. I once asked Fred if he was channeling some famous admiral when he played that role. “Nah,” he said. “I was thinking of my grandfather and how he talked. Now HE was an authority figure.” Fred had a remarkable career as a citizen. He was the first member of his family to go to college and did well enough as a student to graduate from Vanderbilt Law School. When he passed the bar, he shortened his name from Freddie to Fred. As a young lawyer, he worked as a deputy U.S. Attorney locking up bank robbers and other criminals. After three years, Fred left the practice of law to run Howard Baker's reelection campaign in 1972. That step would change his life. A year later, Baker asked Thompson to become the top Republican counsel for the Senate Watergate committee. It was actually Fred who asked Alexander Butterfield the key question about the taping system. With that one question, President Richard Nixon's future was sealed and his resignation was only a matter of time. After Watergate, Fred went back to the practice of law. In 1977 he accepted a case involving massive corruption in the Tennessee governor's office. That case changed Thompson's future decisively. Hollywood decided the governor's corruption would make a good movie. As the film’s producers were looking for someone to play the crusading lawyer, they decided Thompson was the best person to play himself. Having successfully acted that part in the 1985 movie Marie, Thompson then went on to play the CIA director in Kevin Costner's No Way Out, the airport manager in Bruce Willis’s Die Hard 2, and the admiral I mentioned in Sean Connery's The Hunt For Red October. In total, Fred played roles in 40 films as well as enjoying a long run as a district attorney in Law and Order. Fred was drawn back into politics when Al Gore left the Senate to become vice president in 1993. Fred won his U.S. Senate seat in 1994 riding around the state in a red pickup truck. Imagine this Vanderbilt lawyer, Watergate counsel, successful attorney, and Hollywood actor riding around in a red pick up truck and you have some idea of the power of his personality. Thompson was a good senator, a credible presidential candidate in 2008, a real asset to the American Enterprise Institute as a scholar, and a deeply committed husband, father and grandfather. Fred represented the best in the American tradition. He was a citizen before he was a politician. He cared about his country and voted the way he believed. Because he was not a career politician, he could vote and speak as his conscience. Fred was impossible to intimidate because he knew he could earn a living without a vote and he knew there were a lot of things in life more important than being a senator. In a very real sense, Fred was the classic American whose independence was grounded in a willingness to work and take risks. He called them as he saw them. We didn't always agree but we always respected the integrity and independence within which each of us operated. When Fred endorsed my presidential campaign in 2012, it was a high honor and one which Callista and I will always cherish. Fred Thompson was an American original. He will be deeply missed. Our prayers go out to his family. Your Friend,Newt

There is some justice in this case. At least he is in jail in Peru, but another young lady died first.

One last footnote. There is no limit to the sickness of women who go for such monsters:

'In a prison ceremony on 4 July 2014, Van der Sloot was married to Leidy (alt. Leydi) Figueroa, a Peruvian woman whom he met while she was selling goods inside the prison. She was 7 months pregnant with his child at the time.[177] On 28 September 2014 L. Figueroa gave birth to an 8 lb baby girl in Peru '